4 Ready-Made Design Systems That'll Make Your Life a Breeze

We have worked on many highly time-sensitive projects, which meant we had to reduce the product development time as much as possible. And using design systems has been one of our main shortcuts in those scenarios.

Design systems make front-end developers' jobs really easy, offering a collection of reusable components that can be used to create a unified look and feel for a product or application. When startups try to turn their ideas into a workable prototype, most of the time, we don’t have time to waste on functionality that is pretty common all across the applications. These functionalities might include combo menus, dropdowns, layouts, menus, etc. list is quite extensive. 

When you need to go live quickly, this will significantly benefit you. By conservative estimates, it will at least shorten your development time by half, if not more. And half the time also means half the money.

Using ready-to-go component libraries also makes much sense in terms of documenting the project. When you use something that is ready to use and has extensive documentation, you should remember that it comes with the package. We don’t have to create separate docs for the project's reusable components, which we all know developers don’t like doing.

While the benefits of using design systems are evident, it can take time to determine which one to choose out of the many options out there. In this article, we'll explore some of the best UI design systems we usually use, including Material Design, Ant Design, Tailwind UI, and Vuetify. We will explain their purpose and how they can streamline your design process. So let’s dive in!

Material Design

Material Design is a design system created by Google that was introduced in 2014. It is a set of guidelines and principles used to create a unified design across all of Google's digital products. It has become extremely popular due to its use of modern design principles, such as responsive layouts, animations, and dynamic colors. It emphasizes the use of typography, grids, and color to create an aesthetically pleasing design. At the same time, its consistent elements and motion properties make it easier for developers and designers to create consistent, cross-platform user experiences. 

With its modern aesthetic and intuitive design, Material Design is an excellent choice for anyone looking to create a modern UI. 

In our project, Defi City, we utilized Material Design to create a modern and intuitive user interface that is easy for users to navigate and interact with. We also appreciated the fact that Material Design is responsive and adapts to different screen sizes and devices, which was important for creating a user interface that works well across different platforms. Overall, using Material Design in our project helped us create a high-quality user experience for our users.

Overall, here is a quick summary of the Material Design pros and cons.

Advantages

1. Enhanced user experience: Material Design offers a consistent, intuitive and user-friendly experience on any device, as it features a unified system of components, animations, and gestures, making it easy for users to navigate through the app.
2. Large Community: One of the biggest advantages of using the Material design is that the library has fewer bugs, and you can easily find an answer to any question without spending too much effort.
3. Dark Mode: A dark theme is a low-light UI that displays primarily dark surfaces. Material Design has added this feature to all its components to make it easier for developers to add this feature to their applications with less configuration and styling.
4. Cross-platform compatibility: Material Design is designed to work on different platforms like mobile and web applications, making it easier to create apps that can be used on all platforms.

Disadvantages

1. The Material design doesn’t easily tailor to individual needs: It has been created as a one-size-fits-all solution to user interface design, but for example, if an app needs a unique navigation style that Material design does not offer, it may be challenging to create it with the help of other components.
2. Material Design is considered to be more complicated than other design systems. The difference between material UI vs tailwind is that Material puts greater emphasis on animations, transitions, and a layered approach to design, which can take more work to implement. Additionally, it relies heavily on grids and typography, which require more precision than traditional design methods.

Ant Design 

Ant Design is an enterprise-class UI design language and React UI library with high-quality Ant UI React components. It also has a lot of resources built around it, which we can use to simplify the UI development process further.

Ant Design System has its own design principles, style guides, and a library of components. All the components are written in TypeScript, which defines all the necessary types. Currently, the popular front-end development stack developed by Alibaba Group is used as the basis for Ant design. The project was developed with the NPM + WebPack front-end workflow in mind. 

Ant Design has many out-of-the-box ready features and components that are integrable with VueJs, React, or Angular projects.

How to Use Ant Design Components?

Ant-design’s library features over 60 customizable components based on the design language established by the library’s creators. This makes it one of the unique libraries in the industry because all of its components draw inspiration from its design aesthetic.

The professional UI component library has over 6,000 weekly NPM downloads and 53,000 stars on GitHub. When many people use a project, it tends to be less prone to bugs. So if you are looking for a stable solution for your component library, Ant UI might be worth considering. 

Advantages

1. An enterprise-grade web application interface designed with a high aesthetic value. 
2. Quality React components are included out of the box. 
3. The code is written in TypeScript with predictable, static types. 
4. A package of design resources and development tools that provide a complete package. 
5. Dozens of languages natively support internationalization. 
6. Complete control over the theme with every element in place.

Downsides

Customizations can be painful. Anyone who has ever worked on a ready-to-use library before and tried to customize it to their liking knows that it can become a mess in no time. Ant design is not an exception; this is why we need to pay close attention to how customization is done and try to follow best practices to keep the codebase up. 

When using 3rd party packages to accomplish your goals, you should know that your 100% needs will be different. So 3rd, party restrictions come with the project, and we might need to create some custom components to create functionalities that still need to be added.

Tailwind UI

Tailwind UI is a design system developed by Tailwind CSS, the popular utility-first CSS framework. It is designed to make it easier for developers to create beautiful and consistent user interfaces.

Advantages

Tailwind UI has several advantages over other design systems. First, the fact that it is built on the popular Tailwind CSS framework allows developers to quickly and easily build user interfaces using the same design principles that Tailwind has been successfully deploying for years. This makes it easier for developers to create visually pleasing, consistent, and performant interfaces.

One of the main benefits of Tailwind UI is its customizability. Tailwind UI components come with pre-written Tailwind CSS, so developers can easily customize their components to fit their exact needs. For example, Tailwind CSS provides a wide range of predefined colors with several shades and fonts that can be used to create a unique look and feel for a website or application.

Additionally, Tailwind UI also provides a variety of tools and features that allow developers to quickly prototype, customize components, and create complex user interfaces.

What’s more, while comparing material UI vs. tailwind, the Tailwind UI is more universal. Material UI, based on Google's own design system, seems more opinionated. It may offer several variants of the same component, but all of them are still built around one design. Tailwind UI, on the other hand, offers more freedom and gives the opportunity to fit the ready-made components to our design tastes. So it would be easier for startups to adjust their design systems to Tailwind UI rather than Material Design.

Another benefit of Tailwind UI is its speed and convenience. All the components are pre-built, so developers can quickly piece together the necessary components with minimal effort. This also means that developers can get to work straight away, as there is no need to build components from scratch. Besides, it is updated frequently, and they always try to keep up with the latest native CSS innovations.

We used Tailwind UI on one of our projects, Athenno, where the priority was a pleasant user interface as well as a quick MVP. For starters, we tweaked the default Tailwind CSS font, spacing, and color configurations to fit our needs. As for components, we used a lot of different tables, dropdowns, text inputs, etc., which helped us prototype and ship code quickly and confidently.

Disadvantages

Limited Flexibility: Tailwind UI is built on Tailwind CSS, which provides a lot of flexibility and power to create custom UI components. However, it can be difficult to customize components beyond the parameters of Tailwind’s built-in capabilities. 

Learning Curve: There is a little bit of a learning curve in Tailwind CSS trying to remember what these class names mean, what they are mapped to, etc. It might be a challenge, but after a week of consistent work with utility classes, it all evens out.

Vuetify

Vuetify complies with the Material Design specification, meaning the core features of both Vue and Material are available by default and can be improved upon by both communities. In addition, the Vue design system offers the following features:

1. Compatibility with Vue CLI-3 and RTL
2. Templates for various frameworks, like Cordova, webpack, etc.
3. Internationalization (i18n) support
4. Server-side rendering (SSR) and Progressive Web App (PWA) capabilities

Server-side rendering (SSR) is an application's ability to convert HTML files on the server into a fully rendered HTML page for the client.

Progressive Web App (PWA) is a website that looks and behaves like a mobile app.

Advantages of Vuetify

Vuetify is easy and intuitive to use in Vue projects, and it includes nice documentation for developers. Vuetify supports slotting, a mechanism for Vue components that allows you to compose your components and inject content into a child component by passing template code.

It also supports language Internationalization (i18n) of its components. You can specify available and currently active locales when bootstrapping your application with the current option. The lang service also supports easy integration with Vue-i18n. Vuetify can be added by installing the Nuxt Vuetify module. Once installed, update your nuxt.config.js file to include the Vuetify module in the build. With the Vuetify grid system, you can create a very powerful responsive Vuetify layout without any line of JavaScript code.

Summing Up

In conclusion, building a product with ready-made design systems is an effective way to streamline development, reduce costs, and maintain a consistent user experience across all platforms. Design systems allow developers to quickly and easily create beautiful, intuitive, and user-friendly products.

Overall, exploring the different UI design systems revealed that each system is unique and has its own strengths. Ultimately, the best design system for a specific project depends on the needs and goals of your project. However, no matter which system you choose, you can be sure that your project will have a great efficiency boost.